Starbound is finally earthbound. Chucklefish Games’ 2D sandbox exploration game will be officially released on July 22nd, after swimming in Steam’s Early Access pool for over two years.

In the game, the player begins by fleeing their home planet in a spaceship. There are multiple available races, and each has their own reason for leaving their home world. The player lands on a habitable planet to explore the vast sandbox universe where they can complete both quests and story-driven missions. According to Starbound creator Finn "Tiy" Brice, the player will also have the ability to choose an alternative path to earn their place in the galaxy. This includes the ability to farm and sell crops, construct buildings and charge rent to traveling NPCs, and pirating spaceships and planets.

Starbound was formally announced in February 2012 and a tiered Kickstarter was released on April 13th, 2013. Within 24 hours over 10,000 people had pledged $230,000 to fund the game's development. Supporters had pledged $2 million by its beta release on December 4th, 2013.

Although the game has been stuck in Early Access, it has already earned several awards and achievements. It won Indie Game Magazine's "Most Anticipated Game of 2013" and Indie DB’s "No. 1 Indie Game of the Year 2013". Starbound has already sold over one million copies.

Chucklefish developers remarked, “While Starbound will be finished in two weeks, this isn’t the end. We will continue to update and support Starbound for as long as we can. We’ve got loads of cool ideas we couldn’t fit into 1.0 but hope to put into future updates.”